Title |
The sad truth about depressive realism
|
---|---|
Published in |
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, January 2018
|
DOI | 10.1080/17470210601002686 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Lorraine G. Allan, Shepard Siegel, Samuel Hannah |
Abstract |
In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are non-depressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high--the "outcome-density effect". In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed "depressive realism", and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as "sadder but wiser". We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
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United States | 1 | 10% |
Spain | 1 | 10% |
Ukraine | 1 | 10% |
Unknown | 7 | 70% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 6 | 60% |
Scientists | 4 | 40% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 3 | 2% |
United States | 2 | 1% |
Switzerland | 1 | <1% |
Germany | 1 | <1% |
Portugal | 1 | <1% |
Japan | 1 | <1% |
Canada | 1 | <1% |
Greece | 1 | <1% |
Serbia | 1 | <1% |
Other | 0 | 0% |
Unknown | 159 | 93% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Researcher | 25 | 15% |
Student > Bachelor | 25 | 15% |
Student > Ph. D. Student | 23 | 13% |
Student > Master | 18 | 11% |
Student > Doctoral Student | 12 | 7% |
Other | 50 | 29% |
Unknown | 18 | 11% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 101 | 59% |
Social Sciences | 9 | 5% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 7 | 4% |
Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 7 | 4% |
Neuroscience | 6 | 4% |
Other | 17 | 10% |
Unknown | 24 | 14% |